Church of St. Augustine

The Provincial Palace, in a beautiful seafront location, is the first city building constructed with modern culture to a design by engineer Grasso in the early 19th century. But the building, which even in modern times has undergone a series of remodeling and extensions–such as the clock tower which is from the late 19th century–sits on top of a monastery dedicated to St. Augustine, built in the 1400s. At that time, the building overlooked the beach and insisted on the city walls, and it was precisely on the beach in front of it that the painted panel so-called of the Madonna of Constantinople was miraculously found in 1453, a painting considered miraculous and linked to popular devotion.

The line of the building facing the sea – the entrance to the monastery was on the opposite side – highlights a sober symmetry set above the axis of the gateway with four balconies on each side. Nineteenth-century paintings and then numerous period photos depict the palace that was considered the hub of the new city. Inside are preserved some valuable paintings ranging from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century.

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The Church of St. Augustine, which gives onto the side of the square that was originally the entrance to the convent, is of late seventeenth-century design, but is obviously of fifteenth-century origin, and in it takes place a episode of a novella by Masuccio Salernitano, the major novelist of the fifteenth century in Italy.

Inside the church, in addition to the 14th-century Table of Our Lady of Constantinople (actually of Western layout), there are other precious works of art, including a beautiful wooden Crucifix from the 15th century.